This Week in Digital

Laura Britten

Marketing Manager

November 11th 2016

This week in digital

Fancy the Worst Job in Ireland?

This week budget airline, Ryanair, launched a search to find its outspoken CEO, Michael O’Leary, an assistant. To garner a bit of tongue in cheek PR along the way, it has been advertised as the “Worst Job in Ireland”. The attributes required include “thick skin, saint-like patience, aversion to bolloxology, own collection of nursery rhymes / bedtime stories, ability to operate without sleep or contact with the outside world and (ego) massage qualifications”. You can apply here if you’re interested…

John Lewis Christmas Ad Airs

The advert we’ve all been waiting for – British department store, John Lewis, has gained a reputation in the last few years for producing the one advert that the country waits with anticipation in the build-up to the Christmas period. And it seems they haven’t disappointed. Within the first hour of release on social media yesterday it was already outperforming previous years’ offerings in terms of social shares. Across Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, the ad received 218,330 shares in the first hour of its release, more than the past three ads (Man in the Moon, Monty the Penguin and Bear and the Hare) had received in the first 24 hours. The most shared Christmas advert of all time remains as last year’s offering from the German supermarket, Edeka, which we covered in This Week in Digital last year, and has been shared nearly 4 million times. Here’s the ad in its entirety and some of the funnier social media reactions.

Free Tea Isn’t What it Seems

When a tourist grabbed a bottle of iced tea in Japan and started drinking it without paying for it, a classic case of lost in translation occurred. “Free Tea” is actually a brand name of iced tea in Japan, and doesn’t mean that it is a complimentary beverage. An onlooker overheard the resulting altercation between the shopkeeper and the tourist and tweeted the offending packaging on Twitter, which subsequently went viral. Just another example of why translation can’t be done in a silo without cultural references being thought about.

Virtual Italy

If you’ve ever been sat in an Italian restaurant and thought to yourself how much nicer the food would taste if you were sat by the sea in Sicily, then Italian restaurant chain, Carluccio’s may have just what you’ve been looking for – virtual reality goggles. The Google Cardboard glasses will be left in and around the restaurants from this month, all users have to do is use their smartphones to click a special link provided by Carluccio’s and you will be transported to regions of Italy that have inspired the chain’s new menu.

Sweet Tragedy

This week, much-loved Swiss chocolatier, Toblerone, revealed that its famous triangle segments were getting set further apart, meaning less chocolate for your money. This infuriated the British public so much that on the eve of the US presidential election, it was still the most read article on the BBC News app.